Matt Venables
Matt Venables

I build intuitively obvious software for the web and your phone.

TL;DR Me:

I am a product-focused engineer, entrepreneur, and angel investor with a successful history of building products that scale.

I recently co-founded Catena Labs to build tools to help bring AI to every app.

I write and speak about software, business, crypto, and AI.

Keep reading: the longer version.

👋npx hello

Today, I put together a tiny, fun npm package called hello which lets you browse Github profiles from the command line.

It's intentionally limited and simple. Just type: npx hello followed by a Github username and it will print out a summary of the user's profile, including their name, bio, location, and links to their website, Twitter, and Github.

For example:

npx hello venables

Preview

npx hello venables

... why?

I had reseved the hello name quite some time ago, and hand never found a good usecase for it. At first, it was going to be a websocket-based web framework, but the world has plenty of frameworks. Then I thought it would be a good name for a package that will just print "Hello, world!" in a random language. But that's not very useful.

So the name laid dormant.

Until today.

While browsing Github profiles for candidates at Catena Labs (psst: We're hiring!), the thought occurred to me: it would be great for everyone to have a consistent CV, and even better if it was accessible via the command line. So, I quickly tossed together v0 of this project.

Check out the source code if you're interested. It's a simple Typescript project built from the startkit-typescript starter template.

🥞This stack

I've changed stacks for this site several times over the years, from static HTML, to Ruby, to JS, back to Ruby, and now:

  • Next.js using Typescript, hosted on Vercel. I don't care that Vercel is "expensive", it's a dream to work with. And Next for building static content, like it was originally intended. The dream.
  • StartKit for the Next.js boilerplate. I wrote it, so I'm biased. But it got me running quickly and lets me git pull the latest and greatest with no headaches.
  • Tailwind CSS for styling. I have too much love for Tailwind.
  • Contentlayer for markdown content. I previously used MDX but Contentlayer was just too easy to use.

I once wrote that "we've gone too far" with all the tech needed to host a static site like this. I still believe that to an extend, but I love to write in markdown, and I love how this site is built. So I may be a hypocrite, but I'm a happy hypocrite.